Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale (2022)

giansegato.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 74 posts

Re: Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale (2022)

#41

Post by KineticLensman »

jrm4 wrote: post #32
VHRanger wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the fundamental mechanic here. Spence signalling[1] won the econ Nobel back in 2001. It says that the cost of signalling in a market for imperfect information ends on the one emitting the signal. For education and jobs, the signal is your degree (hence the huge career difference between dropping out one week before getting a degree and completing). The cost of the degree will fall on the studen…

Blah blah blah. This is way forest-for-trees stuff. I work in higher ed and have used this stuff forever. What OP said is simpler and closer to the easier answer. The person PAYING isn't the consumer; the actual consumer (me and the students) have very little say or influence in how these things work. If you wanted to make effective, I don't know, mops, you'd INTERVIEW JANITORS AND GET THEIR FEEDBACK, and somehow mak…

Agree. Although I encountered an interesting who-are-the-users? issue when I was involved in using simulations to support training. The people buying the systems did at least understand they they should consult the users when writing their (so-called) user requirements. But who were the users? Three categories were identified: The students themselves, the instructors and the 'customers' of the training system - the people who had to 'employ' the students when trained. After a lot of discussion, they picked the instructors as the main users, and wrote the requirements for the training system with them in mind.

It worked, sort of. But what was overlooked was that the individuals who spent most actual screen time with the systems were the courseware developers. They had to build the training scenarios, which involved a lot of faffing around in the virtual world to create content that would support specific training objectives. The courseware devs, using the completed system, reckoned on an hour of dev time to build five minutes of useful training in the sim. One of the reasons it was so slow was that the courseware devs (think of them as level designers in a gaming context) had very few tools to help them build the scenario, e.g. to check map inter-visibility. The system devs had created some great tools for the instructors (e.g. after action review) but they had pretty much failed to consider how many different training scenarios were needed to keep the training relevant over time, and thus the relative importance of scenario dev tools.

Re: Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale (2022)

#42

Post by aidanlister »

cushychicken wrote: post #20

Maybe as a venture funded startup they don’t. I run a modestly successful edtech business that I have line of sight to making my full time gig in a few years if growth continues. www.reportcardcomments.com I think consumer edtech that makes products focused on making individual teachers’ lives easier has a niche. Maybe not as a 100x unicorn, but as a one person business, there’s plenty of opportunity yet out there.

That’s not “scale”. That’s the opposite of scale.

Re: Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale (2022)

#43

Post by zeroCalories »

jrm4 wrote: post #32
VHRanger wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the fundamental mechanic here. Spence signalling[1] won the econ Nobel back in 2001. It says that the cost of signalling in a market for imperfect information ends on the one emitting the signal. For education and jobs, the signal is your degree (hence the huge career difference between dropping out one week before getting a degree and completing). The cost of the degree will fall on the studen…

Blah blah blah. This is way forest-for-trees stuff. I work in higher ed and have used this stuff forever. What OP said is simpler and closer to the easier answer. The person PAYING isn't the consumer; the actual consumer (me and the students) have very little say or influence in how these things work. If you wanted to make effective, I don't know, mops, you'd INTERVIEW JANITORS AND GET THEIR FEEDBACK, and somehow mak…

If students are getting degrees to get hired, maybe it's the companies that are the consumer? Unless you're going for your own enlightenment, but I think that's a privilege reserved for rich kids.

Re: Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale (2022)

#44

Post by ndriscoll »

gamerDude wrote: post #28
williamcotton wrote: post #14

I’d want to see extensive research on the benefits of Ed-Tech products before they are unleashed on classrooms full of actual students. “Making things easier for teachers” is often not the case and simultaneously creates costs for training and support at these institutions along with the exponential growth required to administer these new roles. And then of course are the students themselves. How do iPads compare to…

I worked with a lot of schools in my last company and unfortunately I don't think extensive research is the best road either. While I totally understand your position, this excuse is also used for only allowing pen and paper for math in highschool by teachers. It takes a crazy amount of time to extensively research and prove things in education for a few reasons: There is opposition to doing the research because teac…

Certainly computers/calculators are useful sometimes (in particular when analyzing measured data), but for say 95% of mathematics, pen+paper seems appropriate? Taught properly, it's a highly pictorial subject and pen+paper is an extremely flexible medium.

Re: Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale (2022)

#45

Post by notarobot123 »

KineticLensman wrote: post #12
ahaucnx wrote: post #10

I second that. Originally we were targeting schools as our main customers but found it incredible difficult to sell too. The main reason probably that the beneficiaries (the students) are not the decision makers (the school admin) and that our product (air quality) is also not a core aspect of a school. There also seems to be a run to the bottom regarding quality of products in many schools and no appreciation for su…

> the beneficiaries (the students) are not the decision makers (the school admin) This is an example of a standard problem in enterprise computing where the people with purchasing authority are far removed from the actual users.

Is this perhaps a general failure mode of private investment into civic institutions? Centralized decision-making has inevitable blind-spots and, as a general rule, doesn't work well for larger scale resource distribution problems.

Re: Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale (2022)

#46

Post by jrm4 »

zeroCalories wrote: post #43
jrm4 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blah blah blah. This is way forest-for-trees stuff. I work in higher ed and have used this stuff forever. What OP said is simpler and closer to the easier answer. The person PAYING isn't the consumer; the actual consumer (me and the students) have very little say or influence in how these things work. If you wanted to make effective, I don't know, mops, you'd INTERVIEW JANITORS AND GET THEIR FEEDBACK, and somehow mak…

If students are getting degrees to get hired, maybe it's the companies that are the consumer? Unless you're going for your own enlightenment, but I think that's a privilege reserved for rich kids.

Again, you're getting too abstract. It's US, the teachers first. Then perhaps the students as well.

Re: Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale (2022)

#47

Post by victorbjorklund »

williamcotton wrote: post #14

I’d want to see extensive research on the benefits of Ed-Tech products before they are unleashed on classrooms full of actual students. “Making things easier for teachers” is often not the case and simultaneously creates costs for training and support at these institutions along with the exponential growth required to administer these new roles. And then of course are the students themselves. How do iPads compare to…

do you also demand extensive academic research for benefits of tools for developers, business etc? Yes, there is an issue with tools and software that creates more problems that they solve (just as in business) but that doesnt mean all technology is bad.

Re: Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale (2022)

#48

Post by grvdrm »

codingdave wrote: post #2

"See, when you build an education product, you’re competing against two massive institutions: the formal education system (schools, colleges, state universities, etc.), and the laws and cultural expectations around that system." Well, there's your problem. I worked for years in those markets, cooperating with their needs, not fighting them. You succeed in such markets by helping them do what they already do... just b…

> Disruption happens at a procedural level, not by changing what they do

I love everything about this statement. I've seen this from both sides, as a seller of software and buyer/user of software. All of the stickiest changes happen procedural level, usually not through full-blown change but instead moderate tweaks and improvements.

One way I like to think about it is this: if my software is all of the sudden unavailable, what will users do? Can they keep working? Will they keep working?

Specific to education, I would hope that many core school functions like teaching would simply revert to simpler methods or alternatives rather than grind to a halt.

But I assume that the process of convincing the buyers to use your software runs headfirst into confusion over how much work it will be to learn something new rather than stick with (mostly) status quo.

Re: Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale (2022)

#50

Post by spoonjim »

cushychicken wrote: post #20

Maybe as a venture funded startup they don’t. I run a modestly successful edtech business that I have line of sight to making my full time gig in a few years if growth continues. www.reportcardcomments.com I think consumer edtech that makes products focused on making individual teachers’ lives easier has a niche. Maybe not as a 100x unicorn, but as a one person business, there’s plenty of opportunity yet out there.

This is not an “edtech startup.” It’s a side hustle
Post reply on HN